Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (24 page)

The morning of the accident, now that Theo looked back on it, began like any other day. Or so he had told the
polizia
, when they had questioned him along with the rest of production. Theo had seen nothing, been nowhere near the set when it happened. In point of fact, he’d been sent home in disgrace only the night before, when
he’d failed to produce the required twenty-four liters of fake blood for the severed hand shoot, and they’d had to wrap early.

The shame!

But that was last night. Today was a new day, and Theo had busied himself with
due
cappuccino, ordered at the same time and sprinkled with cocoa, alongside a flaky cornetto that only somewhat haphazardly contained pudding or not. These were carried outside,
as usual, and eaten in hot silence, also as usual,
at the small tables in front of the Jardinieri, the one café with an Internet point. Only the old woman had been there, the one with the still older hands and the ankles that looked like elephant legs, dry and cracking and firmly planted beneath her shapeless black shift. She nodded at Theo, he recalled, but didn’t meet his eyes.

“Effing sirocco.”
That’s what Theo had said, he remembered saying it, though aside from the Elephant Woman, there was no one there to tell. He hadn’t had breakfast with anyone—not even with his father—since first coming on location to the small southeastern Italian town. The sirocco, the hot, gritty wind blown up from North Africa, had wrapped its fingers around Theo like a fist, carrying off the words the moment
they left his mouth. Though he sat no more than fifty yards from the Adriatic Sea, there was no relief. Even the small medusas that lazed in the blue-lit waters had gone into hiding beneath the rocks. This particular wind’s hold on Theodore Gray was miserable and total, like so many other things in his life.

What next?

Theo remembered it like flashbacks, like one of the dream sequences his father,
Jerome Gray, the American director,
il regista americano
, was so fond of using.

Cue scene.

A boy running through the archway of the Porta Terra, stumbling over the cobblestone path leading into the Old City of Otranto.

Cue sound.

Shouting, in two languages. Italian for the shopkeepers, and English for the
americano
.

Cue crazy.

Frantic gesturing, hands flapping in the air like wings. Theo
finally understood the vague message—that something was really, truly wrong. That something had finally
happened
.

The waitress finally tried to explain it to him, herself.
“Gli americani ottusi! Gli idioti di
Hollywood
! Hanno gettato una casa in mare!”

Theo understood “stupid Americans”—he’d heard it often enough—and something about Hollywood, probably and deservedly equally stupid.

But that
last part—tossing a house into the sea? Or a gelato into the house of sea? His Rosetta Stone Italian must be failing him.

The Elephant Woman shook her head, finally pointing up the hill toward the center of the Old City. When she spoke, her ivory teeth—capped in gold but rotting black—took on the air of some sort of ancient, evil treasure. “Go, boy. Castello Aragonese. There is trouble.
Americano
trouble.” As if on cue, a gust of wind knocked a café table over, sending it rolling into the stone street, while a large black bird circled overhead, squawking. It was amazing, really, like a scene from a movie—possibly even the movie they had come to Otranto to shoot, themselves.

A black feather came floating down from the sky, and the Elephant Woman crossed herself.
“Il falco, un cattivo presagio.”

“
Il falco
? The falcon?” Theo put down his cup.

“Cattivo presagio,”
she repeated. “You say,
Inglese
, dark—dark omen.” She kept speaking, but Theo couldn’t hear, as the bells of the
cattedrale
had begun to chime.

Nine o’clock, on the hour.

After the bells faded into silence, only the sound of screaming hung in the air.

A woman.

Theo flinched.

Not just any woman.

A woman so famous for that
particular scream, she’d made a career spanning forty years out of it. Pippa Lords-Stewart, star of stage and screen. Eclipsed only by Her Majesty’s Own Sir Manfred Lords, Pippa’s former husband and present costar of their current project—the first time they’d shared the screen in the decade since their infamous marriage more infamously ended. All of which meant more paparazzi than Theo had ever
seen on one of his father’s sets, which meant more coverage, which meant more money for the budget—or any money at all, as the case may be. Truthfully, Pippa and Sir Manny and their exquisitely rotten relationship—the sheer number of drinks either could toss at any given dinner went into the double digits—were the only reason Jerome Gray had managed to secure some slightly shady Bulgarian film financing
at the last minute, once Germany had pulled out.

Nobody hated each other as well—or as wealthily—as they did.

But the woman could also scream like no one else, and that was Pippa screaming, Theo was sure of it. After the scene they’d shot on the roof of the Castello Aragonese last night—the one where Pippa, the lady of the castle, discovers the lifeless body of her son, who has been killed by
a falling suit of armor—well, after seventeen takes, even a lowly production assistant like Theo would know that particular scream anywhere. A single close-up of the disembodied hand still wearing bloody armor had taken nearly an hour. “It’s a freaking haunted castle. Get me more blood,” his father had bellowed, between every take.

Twenty-four liters.

When it came to Jerome Gray and blood, there
was never enough.

The only problem was, they weren’t filming now—and yet Pippa was still screaming.

That one deduction sent Theo running through the Porta Terra, stumbling over the cobblestones like the shouting boy had before him, like the wind. He wound his way up through the alleyways of the Old City, past the shops, past the walls of weathered leather sandals and dried herbs and Puglian
wine and ceramic bowls painted with olives or sailboats—past the clay tarantulas, the sign of the tarantella still danced in Salento—past the
cattedrale
itself, with the tombs and the crypts and the frescoes and the mosaic floor that looked as if it were built by a mad, drunk priest—until the Castello came into sight.

The Castello Aragonese, also known to production as the Castle of Otranto,
and as thus the setting of his father’s film of the same name, was the reason they were here for the hottest summer of Theo’s seventeen years. His father had insisted a sound stage in Burbank wouldn’t do, and Pippa agreed on this location when she’d heard Helen Mirren had bought a
masseria
in Puglia—which sounded very glamorous to Pippa, until she realized the word only meant “farmhouse,” mosquitos
and rocks and all.

And then there was the small matter of the castle itself, in reality. In hot, dusty reality. Squat and stone, the color of a carved brown potato and about as glamorous looking, it was perhaps not so much Gothic as medieval, and not so much preserved as abandoned. As far as security measures, there was only one key to the place, and only one surly Italian fellow (in the same
dirty black rocker T-shirt, with the words “Pink Floyd” embossed in gold) named Dante allowed to wield it. Dante showed up most mornings, after he’d had a good two or three small coffees, to unchain the front gate and twist open the ancient iron bars. Dante locked the Castello again when he left
for lunch and
sieste
—and since his
sieste
could sometimes last all the way until dinner, Jerome Gray
had decided early on that production had no choice but to let themselves be locked in along with the gate. It had been Theo’s job, then, to get the bar across the piazza to slide panini between the bars in the afternoons. Such was the glamour of life in the Castello.

Then came the transformation. The crew had spent hours adding carved foam pieces to every dusty wall, gluing silk cobwebs and synthetic
ivy to every naturally webby, overgrown corner. The very real cannonballs that were still lodged throughout the place were sprayed a gleaming black over their disappointingly tan stone color, only to be scrubbed tan again when the scene had been wrapped. Stone the color of stone. Dust the color of dust. Mold the color of mold—and none of it the kind you see in the movies—that was the Castello.
Really, Theo found it hard to imagine a novel had ever been written about the place at all.

A row of trailers had been set down in what once was the surrounding moat, now the home of wild fruit trees and tall grasses. The wind blew through them, rattling the grasses like maracas, sending the trailers shaking on their wheels. Still more trailers squatted along the sea wall behind the castle, where
the battlements enclosing the town gave way to the rocky ocean itself. There was the props trailer, and the costume trailer. There was his father’s trailer, where he watched the dailies and came out shouting into his headset (or into his water bottle, which had held many liquids though never, apparently, water) for the rest of the afternoon. There was Pippa’s trailer, the one she shared with
Sullen Matilda, her exceptionally dour assistant, who was only ever known to smile at Theo—a fact Theo found less not more encouraging. There was Sir Manny’s trailer, and next to it, the one belonging to his equally sullen on-screen son, Conrad
James—that Conrad James, teen werewolf of the small screen and the oiled chest. (Oiled and shaved, as was pro forma for a twenty-six-year-old playing a
teen wolf on a nonlupine “off” day.)

Only—

Theo stopped in his tracks, panting.

Only there wasn’t Connie’s trailer. Not where it was supposed to be.

There wasn’t anything, only a gap in the row and a patch of blue-green sea.

And a line of production assistants as expendable as Theo himself, talking in clusters of tattoos and hipster bangs and cut-off jean shorts, smoking.
“—what with the
wind, you couldn’t hear a thing—”

And Sir Manfred, wearing only half a head of hair extensions, screaming into a walkie-talkie, smoking.
“—it could have been me—”

And Jerome Gray, Theo’s father, talking to the
polizia
with both hands, smoking.
“—wind insurance? Who the hell needs wind insurance—”

And Sullen Matilda, texting and smoking.
“—fofmfgf—”

And Pippa, screaming and smoking.
“Connie—Connie—”

That scream.

Conrad James.

Where was Connie?

By the time Theo reached the sea wall, he could see only the remnants of a white trailer, smashed upon the rocks a hundred feet below. A piece of white tin bobbed in the tides. A white door, with a red star upon it.

Conrad’s trailer.

When Theo looked closer, he could see it was dripping red, staining the water and rocks beneath, just like the severed
hand in the scene at the Castello the night before.

Less than a liter, by the look of it.

Effing movies.

There was no body, though. No body, and no Connie. Only red water and rocks, and a scattering of odd-looking black feathers, bobbing in the current.

That was the first problem.

That was how it all began.

II. La Maladizione (The Curse)

Within the hour, word had gotten out, and calls from
the States came flooding in.

Production shut down. The cast sequestered themselves inside the small, warm darkness of the Bar Il Castello across the way, too afraid to enter their own trailers.

By lunchtime, the paparazzi posted blurry photos of the wreckage online at TopPop Italia.

By
sieste
, the
polizia
swarmed the Castello. The normally chained gates were taped off, surrounded by red-and-white-striped
cones. There was no way in or out—and crowds of curious Italian tourists stood in the piazza, looking up at the large, stone potato-castle in front of them, wondering what all the fuss was about. Farther back, crowds of paparazzi sharpened their long, long lenses like so many teeth, like antennae.

An hour after that, the Guardia Costiera began dredging the harbor. It was the greatest spectacle
Otranto had seen since plumbing first came to the region.

Bigger, even.

Inside the Castello bar, the cast put on a different sort of show, even if no one but Theo and the bartender were there to see it. “I’ve a mind to call the British ambassador. Those are my
personal possessions. It’s a matter of security.” Sir Manny was unhappy because his cell phone was trapped inside the Castello, in the
leather saddlebag he liked to sling over his director’s chair.

“Security? Don’t you mean insecurity?” Pippa rolled her eyes, tightening her clutch on her Coca-Cola Light. Theo wondered if she was going to throw it at him.

“Who’s the one complaining about the paps getting their bad side up online, eh, darling?” Sir Manny narrowed his eyes.

Sullen Matilda glared back at him, sitting as she was
between them. If drinks were thrown, she’d be the first casualty.

Theo decided not to wait to find out. Instead, he slipped outside, moving quickly past the production assistants who stood guard at the doorway.

He’d had enough drama for one morning.

It wasn’t until Theo made his way to the shadows behind his father’s trailer that he heard the shouting coming from inside.

“Don’t answer that.
Blocked number—that’s Bulgaria, and I got nothing to say to Bulgaria.” His father sounded frantic, and the phone only kept buzzing.

“Jerry. It’s online already. Bulgaria knows. New York knows. LA probably knows.” Diego, the Italian dialogue coach, answered in perfect English.

“What is there to know? If there’s no body, there’s no body. It can’t be a murder if no one was murdered.” His father
sounded panicked.

“Tell that to the
polizia
, Jerry. They’re shutting us down. You know that’s what comes next.” Diego was from Malie, the next town over, which meant he was the only person who knew anything about what the police or the town magistrates or the Italian
film commission was actually going to do at any given time. “You know what they think, the whole castle’s cursed. We shouldn’t
have come here. They shouldn’t have let us film here, no matter how many euros crossed hands.”